Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the support, passion and insight of the Senator on this issue because it is not easy and she rightly homed in on community acceptance. We are seeking to do several things to build that up. One is that every public body, such as local authorities and the HSE, is being asked to adopt a climate change mandate. I hope that public leaders in every community will adopt a strategy and attitude in their interactions with clients, suppliers and workers that this is a change we need to make. The Senator's local authority is taking a leadership role in that regard and has an ambition to have a carbon-neutral strategy.

Her suggestion to use the regional spatial strategies to embrace the physical change is a good one. If I announced 100 years ago that an underground tank containing highly inflammable fuel was to be installed in every village and that people would be expected to dip into it to fill up their cars, there would be a huge reaction against that proposal, but petrol stations are now part of the furniture. There is a garage with a forecourt in every town and village and people do not bat an eyelid. This will involve change. We are not used to the technology or infrastructures we need to be sustainable. Rather, we are used to the infrastructures that make us unsustainable. As the Senator pointed out, there is a real issue in terms of how we socialise that structural change in our society. We are trying to maximise community gain and participation, including local people being close to facilities that are being provided having sustainable energy communities and having mandates for every public body. As a result of the green schools programme, many children go home and lecture their parents on the weaknesses of some of their behaviour. We are starting to wheel that scrum, but there is far more to be done.

We will amend the national energy and climate plan, NECP, such as in respect of the new target we are adopting for renewables. In the previous NECP we put our hands up and admitted that a target of 75 million tonnes was to be met, that 16 million tonnes of the target would be met from what we were doing and that another 58 million tonnes had to be found. We will show how we hope to find those 58 million tonnes across various areas of activity.

I fully agree with the Senator that balanced regional development constitutes a real and sustained challenge. On the national broadband plan, the reason we made that decision was not to bring ire on our heads about the cost of the project but, rather, because we believed that €2.5 billion spread over the next 25 years is a correct investment to future-proof rural Ireland. I will defend that decision to the last. It is the right thing to do and we will be proven right in spite of the short-term push-back which exists. It is right that everything be cross-examined and due diligence applied but we are making the right decisions.

Like every other scheme, a budget was allocated for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, scheme and the SEAI must stay within budget. There is no doubt that one of the features of 100% grants is that demand grows exponentially when such grants are available. We need to move to area-based schemes which involve big blocks of work being done together, some of parts of which will be 100% grant funded while other parts will receive lower levels of contribution. It will be a better model when we develop that alternative.